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The Board on Professional Standards and its committees: Francis McLaughlin, Chairman.
Francis McLaughlin opened the panel presentation by alluding to the current ferment in organized psychoanalysis, much of it focused upon overt issues of criteria and categories of membership in our Association. This, he felt, pointed to a growing and challenging interest in the philosophy and standards of psychoanalytic education. The place and functions of the Board on Professional Standards and its various committees in relation to these issues often seem to be not clearly understood, for reasons that include a general lack of information regarding the organization of the Association itself. The Association in its most general sense is an aggregate of individual psychoanalysts who vote for their officers and by-laws. Clustered locally or regionally into Societies, they function collectively to designate Society representatives to the Executive Council to direct and transact business pertinent to a scientific and professional organization. Clustered into faculties and psychoanalytic institutes, they designate institute representatives (two Fellows for each of the now 21 accredited institutes) to the Board on Professional Standards to direct and transact business pertinent to an educational organization. Only a fraction of the total membership is involved and represented in these institute and Board functions, and the result for the rest seems too often to have been a sense of distancing from the educational affairs of the Association and a perception of the Board as arbitrary and nonprogressive.